Suchergebnisse

Landet som vaknade är en berättelse kring hur den nya ukrainska nationen tog form sedan Sovjetunionens fall, och framför allt kring hur det pågående rysk-ukrainska kriget gjort nationsbygget oåterkalleligt. Boken grundar sig på samtal som Kalle Kniivilä haft med tolv olika personer som har olika upplevelser av kriget samt av hur livet i Ukraina såg ut innan 24 februari 2022.
Landet som vaknade (The Country That Woke Up) tells the story of the new Ukrainian nation's rise after the fall of the Soviet Union, but above all, it is the story of how the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war has made Ukraine's nation-building irreversible. The book is based on conversations that Kalle Kniivilä had with twelve people with different experiences of the war and life in Ukraine before 24 February 2022.

The literature on divided (or contested) cities has expanded rapidly during the past decade, with a handful of iconic sites presiding over the long list of cities wounded by conflict, violence or general unrest. In this article, it is suggested that this literature has overlooked a particular, and increasingly prominent, type of divided city deserving of attention in its own right: the geopolitical fault-line city. The main differences between the "classic" divided city and the geopolitical fault-line city relate to the character and origin of conflict. In divided cities, conflict is mostly local and related to social and spatial justice concerns, discrimination, security and political representation; this makes it somewhat predictable. In geopolitical fault-line cities, on the other hand, the main disputes are about geopolitical alignment, foreign policy, and the overall character of government; such disputes are largely scripted elsewhere, adding a substantial measure of volatility. This article's contribution lies in its provisional theorization of the geopolitical fault-line city in the light of the literature on divided cities. Against a background of powerful ongoing changes in the global information landscape – most notably the increased influence of social media – it illustrates the main characteristics of the geopolitical fault-line city, theorizing its distinctiveness as intrinsically related to the spatio-temporal evolution of information diffusion across the territories of antagonistically predisposed geopolitical alliances.

AbstractUrban theory has long been in the grip of a handful of cities and, despite the recent recalibration of the catalogue of cities that inform it, the emerging geographies of urban studies remain skewed, at the expense of cities often referred to as 'post‐socialist'. This essay considers the notion of the 'post‐socialist city', suggesting that it inadvertently poses limits to our imagination, parochializing research, pauperizing its theoretical capacity, and limiting its potential for comparison by automatically organizing differences into the preconceived categories of what it is and what it is not. It is proposed that the concept (re)produces artificial boundaries that consign 'post‐socialist' urban research to the peripheries of urban knowledge, joining the vast ranks of ordinary cities that fail to meet the criteria of relevance or admissibility embedded in the hegemonic theorizations stemming (mainly) from the northwest quadrant of the world map. Using the example of an extremely peripheral city in Kazakhstan, this essay argues that research on the 'post‐socialist city' should turn its focus to relations, networks and flows while simultaneously dropping the 'post‐socialist', which (re)produces differences vis‐à‐vis the supposed normality of the 'Western' city––differences that are either imagined, exaggerated, misrepresented, outdated or imposed.

Since the demise of central planning, post-Soviet cities have found themselves operating in a radically different economic climate. Contrary to the situation during the Soviet époque, market relations and the urban economy's adjustment thereto constitute the reality which urbanites face in their daily lives. For the vast majority, this reality has been harsh. Even so, market agency in post-Soviet cities is circumscribed by a physical infrastructure composed to foster its rejection, leading to an inevitable tension between Soviet legacy and the reality of the market economy. An overarching task of this dissertation is to contribute to a greater understanding of the new urban form which is emerging out of this tension. For this purpose, eight papers, using case studies from urban Kazakhstan, are brought together in order to shed light on recent urban developments in the former Soviet Union.Two broad themes are subject to particular attention: urbanisation and regional migration processes, and urban socio-spatial differentiation. Urbanisation is studied through the comparative analysis of census data from 1989 and 1999, from which a "closed city effect" pattern emerges. Sovietand post-Soviet era urban-bounf migrant characteristics are compared using survey data (N=3,136) collected by the author, demonstrating the existence of a significant ethnic transition within the migrant flow. Socio-spatial differentiation patterns are mapped and analysed for three Kazakh military-industrial case study cities (Ust'-Kamenogorsk, Leninogorsk and Zyryanovsk), revealing significant spatial disparities which are principally explainable in light of the workings of the Soviet economy, and its built-in priority system. Market forces tend to accentuate them.